A shiny web interface to make accessing the jukebox nice and easy, available on the box or from the comfort of your own lapbox. Click things on your screen and watch in amazement as they happen on another screen! Shock your neighbours! Horrify your colleagues. Make this face:

Current plan as it stands is a jquery/ajax frontend (shiny) and php middleware which sends stuff back and forth from itunes via applescript. Stuck with itunes just because it is on there and working at the moment, but the frontend will stick on to anything with a decent interface.

Features so far:

play/pause, stop, back/forward

mute

currently playing track name

silky-smooth volume slider

Planned features/ideas:

a browser/playlist

a function that queues up random tracks if the playlist ends up empty, to prevent music suddenly ending just as you are delivering that extremely offensive risqué punchline causing one (1) tumbleweed to appear

if id3 tag info is available we could have album art, maybe a website link so people can learn more about the playing artist

Mike (the instigator!) is doing the dirty work on the Mac side of things and has got it all setup nicely, he is going to setup ftp access so that updating things will be straightforward. I just turn up and complain about my half-baked php not working really.

iTunes has a feature that allows people with iPhones and iPod touches to look at the list of tracks and request songs remotely, if the computer has wifi capabilities. I think this would be a nice feature, but it also has the potential to start fights probably.

Well I think the aim is to have this interface available rather than iTunes directly, so that everyone can access it and do some requesting. So basically stealing that idea from the ipods and phones and making it available to all browsers, with a bit more functionality.

Streaming from people's devices would still construe public performance while the cafe was open afaik, so that would probably not be enabled as it would be difficult to enforce the music licensing rules. It would also have the risk of some scallywag queueing up katy perry and causing the painful fiery demise of this whole Earth.

Huw wrote:There's a shiny system here (http://www.playerpal.com/) for playing itunes songs remotely and this looks like exactly the kind of thing we need. There's a trial version available for free too.

It only works on Windows, we use a Mac.

Also:

The trial version is fully functional but it does not display all of your music. The music that is not displayed will appear but the details will display "z Pls Register z". The exact limitation is as follows:

Sorry for the delay folks, had a few deadlines. Anyway this thing is almost done, I just need to test some applescript and tidy up the dog's breakfast design. Also it now publishes the currently playing track to an xml feed in case that is ever useful.

On a different note has anyone thought about setting up the jukebox with a last.fm account? Keep stats of what the café listens to, add a little extra promotion for the artists played on there. Pointful or pointless.

After much faffing about, I managed to stick a new plug on the end of that network cable. So the scrobbles should be scrobbled. And the interface should interface. You getting on alright with applescript, Iain?

Had a minor setback involving itunes not wanting to enqueue a track if you give it the name, but if you give it some weird track identifier it possibly works. Going to test that tomorrow and then hopefully it will be sorted.